Opinion | New media rules will bring order back to chaotic media industry in HK

By Alan Leung, Blogger specialized on current affairs

The Hong Kong Police imposed new media rules on Tuesday and now only recognize media representatives registered with the Information Services Department (ISD) and those from "internationally recognized and well-known" non-local news agencies, newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. This means police events and some protest scenes may now be off-limits to unregistered, online news outlets, student journalists, freelancers and individuals.

The profession strongly rejected the move and believes such a move is close to licensing. They raised serious concerns over the city's press freedom and added to the perception that the city was losing more safeguards. Many in the industry are also claiming that the new rules are bound to affect the work of some journalists and the police had crossed the line, they further threatened to take legal action if their outcry falls on deaf ears.

Nonetheless, what did the industry expect when the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) failed to self regulate the industry and literally handed out press passes to anyone who claims to be a journalist, including underage 13 years old? The HKJA had caused such an unnatural increase of journalists and reporters that in many cases they not only outnumbered the police at the protest but in some cases they even outnumbered the protesters. (In some more recent events the reporters even managed to outnumber the combination of police and protesters.)

What did the profession expect when they failed to regulate their own behavior? How many times have we seen journalists and reporters verbally abuse the police and openly show contempt for our law enforcers? Over the year-long unrest, we have constantly seen the army of journalists and reporters surrounded the police and obstructed their work on live television. In some of the worse cases, they were seen purposely blocking the police in an attempt to create escape routes for the rioters.

When the journalist bodies and the profession began to abuse the power and privilege given to them for their own selfish ideological reasons instead of focusing themselves on grass-root work of self-regulating the industry and ensuring that reports on events are in a non-biased, balanced and fair manner, they should have expected this day to come sooner or later.

Although I support the new media rules as the move will bring some order back to the chaotic media industry in Hong Kong, assist the police weed out fake journalists and stop journalists obstructing police work. I also believe it's crucial that the registration criteria are open and transparent, and the government needs to take the extra step to ensure qualified journalists regardless of their political ideology will not run into any issues when registering with relevant government departments to authenticate their profession.

At the end of the day, while we need law and order, we need to ensure we continue to safeguard Hong Kong's press freedom at the same time.

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